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Does Speaking to Agents Like Cavemen Save 65% of Tokens? We Test
- igor_nast 2mo agoAs the test shows the real gain is somewhat marginal to most people, but still some ppl claim a wide skills portfolio is required to move faster or save tokens. Mixed feelings, I personally use superpowers as my basic setup - and only them. What are your thoughts on it?
- glitchc 2mo agoI use my local GPU. Yes, I realize it's not exactly a superpower, but it's technology that's pretty darn close to one.
- pineappletooth_ 2mo agoWell 8%-10% saving without measured quality degradation is not nothing, specially now that newer models seem to use more tokens than previous ones. Also it was tested on reasoning low, i'd have liked to have them tested on higher reasoning levels.
- mjevans 2mo agoAsk, what is the function of grammar in language? I would argue two major functions. Forcing an encoder to marshal ideas into a coherent structure. Preserving the integrity of that structure when communicated and decoded. Grammar sounds off? Was the message correctly understood; is there enough left to apply error correction and regenerate the intended message?
- altmanaltman 2mo agoYes all the caveman spoke English like its freaking Flinstone. Like wtf is the caveman dilect, just english words with some randomly skipped? Why not try with actual other human languages and see if there is a token benefit in savings
- strictnein 2mo agoSounds like some good research. You should pursue it.
- inasense 2mo agolol - so easy a caveman can do it.
- altmanaltman 2mo agoSomeone definitely should
- gruntled-worker 2mo agoMe mechanic not speak English. But he know what me mean when me say "car no go", and we best friends. So me think: why waste time, say lot word when few word do trick?
- altmanaltman 2mo agoTo see world
- abofh 2mo agoIf you just want a smaller vocabulary, use French? If your goal is to communicate to an LLM, maybe saving tokens isn't the all in win, unless you like reading assert gronkHitThing(true)
- kardos 2mo agoFrench text is somewhere around 10-30% longer than the corresponding English text. I would guess much of what you save on smaller vocabulary is lost on the lengthened text.
- ViscountPenguin 2mo agoWhat would matter more is the token length, depends how well your tokenizer was trained on french I guess.
- mmastrac 2mo agoI suspect this means that there's just a ~10% inefficiency in token to information mapping.
- sh34r 2mo agogpt 4 moto razr wen?
- DougN7 2mo agoI don’t know about the rest of you, but the bulk of my token usage is not what I type in - it’s that data the AI is processing for me. I’m shocked they even got an 8% reduction.
- SmolSpideritito 2mo ago[dead]
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agohttps://groups.google.com/g/alt.nerd.obsessive/c/EGuKIN_4dME/m/y9_ER6MYtNAJ https://groups.google.com/g/alt.nerd.obsessive/c/EGuKIN_4dME... alt.nerd.obsessive FAQ v1.4 In the episode where they were filming the Radioactive Man movie [1995], the comic book store guy tells Bart that he can find out the star of the RM movie. He promptly posts a message to alt.nerd.obsessive which states "Need know star RM pic". This information is relayed through the nerd world until it reaches a nerd hiding under the table at a meeting of movie moguls casting the film. He relays back the answer immediately (Rainier Wolfcastle). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_Man_(The_Simpsons_episode)#Cultural_references https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_Man_(The_Simpsons_...
- jpease 2mo agoWhy not Mandarin Chinese? Logographic is pretty compact. Also, this really should be more precise that it’s talking about neo-caveman. Legit caveman no speak English.
- zuzululu 2mo agoproblem is there are thousands of pictograms you have to know with ambiguous sounds i think korean is the best, just learn the alphabet and you can do pretty crazy compaction by dropping honorifics and abbreviation, you can also sound out foreign words ex. 짱깨 if given the right context LLMs should have no problem understanding
- guessmyname 2mo ago> Why not Mandarin Chinese? Logographic is pretty compact […] What do you mean? A lot of us already use Hanzi (汉字) or Kanji. Or are you asking why non-Chinese speakers do not prompt LLMs in Mandarin?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- sparky_z 2mo agoIt would take the typical English speaker many years of dedicated study to learn Mandarin Chinese to a level of fluency required to take advantage of any token savings. "Caveman speak" can be adopted instantly, by anyone (in, presumably, ~any language) with no study or time investment required.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin
- olalonde 2mo agoActually, when you translate Chinese literally word for word, it sounds a lot like caveman English. 你不去，我也不去 You no go, I also no go 今天这里人很多 Today here person very many 下雨就不去 Fall rain then no go
- NitpickLawyer 2mo agoI think it's funny this works somewhat, but that's not what the goal is, IMO. The goal is to have the model do this internally in its "thinking" stage. On the very rare occasions in the past where gpt5 leaked its true internal thinking, the "CoT" was itself kinda similar. Instead of the open source "so the user wants me to... but wait... maybe I should... blahblah...", GPT5 was using internal traces like "try x.. no.. try y... no.. from x yes then z yes...". That's probably more token saving, or faster responses, if you can get the model to remain accurate.
- qwery 2mo agoSay caveman, cavemen ... unheard[0] cavewoman. No good. Bad. When Sabrewulf[1] come, some fight, some run ... some run in cave. No good. Bad. Token cost. Seem smart less token. But already discount. No profit. Use less token? Price go up. What money? You should be bothered by the persistent & popular use of the "caveman" terminology and the myth surrounding it. However, from a dedicated amateur linguistic point of view, the "caveman language" that so many people seem to know by default is kind of remarkable. Perhaps it points to (it doesn't) some deeper, ancient understanding. [0] this is a joke because the caveman myth comes with a lot of misogynistic baggage and you should have a problem with it. Also because I made you read this. (this is not an explanation of the joke itself, that's up to you) [1] the sabre-tooth cat is a trope that over-represents its relationship with people. I mean it's extinct, but it was around "back then", right?
- bazzingadev 2mo agouninstall caveman install ponytail
- rrotaru 2mo agoFunny enough they also tested ponytail https://blog.jetbrains.com/ai/2026/07/ponytail-skill-claude-tested/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/ai/2026/07/ponytail-skill-claude-...
- seemaze 2mo agoIsn’t spoken language in general and English in particular famously 50% redundant? Does that not provide the same (if not more) benefit to the model when narrowing the scope of intent?
- zombot 2mo agoWhy don't we just use a highly specialized domain-specific language that describes the code we want generated? Natural language is too inexact and ambiguous.
- n0on3 2mo agoYou mean like… some sort of code?
- lovich 2mo agoDoes anyone more familiar with the technology know if these AI models treat abugidas like Thai or abjads like Arabic differently when it comes to token usage? Specifically abjads since as far as I am aware their difference from alphabetical and abugida scripts is that they infer the vowels instead of explicitly marking them.